In what has become a bit of a tradition, every Christmas one of my presents from Father Christmas (I’m British so he’s not Santa) is the latest Ubisoft adventure with Assassin’s v Templars. This year it’s Syndicate. Victorian London is the playground this year and I have to admit it is quite possibly the best looking AC game since we were graced with last of Ezio’s trilogy (Revelations, I think) It helps that Victorian London is a gritty and dirty and really well realised.

This year the main character is actually twins, Evie and Jacob Frye. An interesting idea to split the main storyline between the two of them and give you the option for the side quests…It’s about time AC embraced this kind of option, giving you the option of playing as Evie (more stealth based, a traditional AC character) or Jacob (a cocky, more combat based character). Both with different skill trees (well, there are some skills specific to each of them) and different play styles, the traditional AC gameplay is mixed up a bit, just enough to make it *much* more interesting.

There is a good variety of missions, with the usual missions, this year with added kidnap the criminal, hijack goods, destroy other goods, a whole range and they are well spread out, different missions with nothing ever getting too repetitive.

In case you hadn’t guessed by now, I really enjoyed this game. It genuinely tries new and interesting things, and for the most part succeeds with them. Two characters? works. New mission types? works. Different setting? works. Oh and there are a stupid number of collectables. Or there were. I had a massive super collectable-a-thorn and managed to find 100% of the collectables. My better half Claire helped me to find all the hidden secrets (Treasures of London) and the (for some reason not included in the completion count) Mysteries of London.

Turns out that (Surprise Surprise) she’s actually quite good at games and solving mysteries, and looking at things differently to me (she doesn’t have withered old gamer eyes who see everything cynical) although she doesn’t respond to the visual/audio clues in game quite the same way either.

Anyway, back to the game. It’s good. Very good. I’ve put 58+ hours in and overall completion is 97%

I’m a little bit OCD that there is only a few percent left and I will admit that I *could* do the extra 3% but that means going back and redoing quite a lot of the story missions with the extra parameters met, but that isn’t going to happen. No. Too many of them with too many parameters. Not happening. The game is back in it’s box and in the collection upstairs. Yes, there are still some trophies I could do, but I’m not going to.

58 hours is plenty of time on an AC game. It’s not an epic Bioware/Bathesda/Square RPG, so that’s plenty.

I’ve included a selection of images below and can even link to a shared video (I’m dabbling a little with streaming) – https://youtu.be/HmLm1xV8lq4

Enjoy.

Also, now I’ve finished Assassin’s Creed I promise to try and blog more often. I really do promise…I’ll try…